This is me, Eccles

Sunday, 29 March 2015

Having studied my recent article, entitled
Is your bishop saved?
Mgr Michael Campbell, Bishop of Lancaster and an old friend of this blog, has decided to do something
noble. On
his own blog he has attacked ACTA, the dissent group that was a
source of many Protect the Pope articles.

"Eccles tells me you may be saved after all."

We have not yet contacted Bishop Campbell for a statement, but we believe that he intends to revive the
Protect the Pope blog under another name. So far he has not yet installed a little widget that
tells you how long it is since Enda Kenny should have been excommunicated (1 year, 7 months, 4 weeks, 2 days, 13 hours and a few minutes at the time of writing), but I am sure that it will be coming soon.

We are also looking forward to in-depth articles about the evils of QUEST, the Soho Masses Pastoral Council,
Tony Flannery, Tina Beattie, Basil Loftus, old uncle Tim Radcliffe and all. Or maybe not, as most of
these do not operate in his diocese (when Basil Loftus goes down to London from Ochmahairasee to collect
his thirty pieces of silver from the Catholic Times, he always uses the East Coast Main Line, rather than the
West, in order to to avoid trouble in Lancaster).

Bishop Campbell's robust attack on ACTA has been vigorously supported by Cardinal Vincent Nichols.
"I do not think that secret societies, with their passwords, funny handshakes
and odd rituals, provide the best method for conducting dialogue of this sort," he explained.
"I much prefer it when people come out in the open and write letters to the Catholic Herald,
or else appear on BBC Radio 4 talking to Ed 'Stewpot' Stourton. That's the sort of dialogue the
Pope has asked for, not the cloak-and-dagger tactics favoured by ACTA."

Ed "Stewpot" Stourton interviews a member of ACTA.

Anyway, following Bishop Campbell's initiative, we look forward to seeing other bishops follow suit.
Will we see a "Protect the Pope (Arundel and Brighton Branch)"? Well, miracles do happen...

Dear Sir,
We, the undersigned, wish to endorse and support the letter signed by over 450 priests in the recent edition of the Catholic Herald, http://bit.ly/19kuBkl.
As laity, we all know from our own family experiences, or those of our friends and neighbours, the harrowing trauma of divorce and separation, and we sympathise with all those in such situations.
It is precisely for that reason that we believe that the Church must continue to proclaim the truth about marriage, given us by Christ in the Gospels, with clarity and charity in a world that struggles to understand it.
For the sake of those in irregular unions, for the sake of those abandoned and living in accordance with the teachings of the Church, and above all for the sake of the next generation, it is essential that the Church continues to make it quite clear that sacramental marriage is indissoluble until death.
We pray, and expect, that our hierarchy will represent us, and the Church’s unwavering teaching, at the Synod this autumn.
Yours faithfully,

Saturday, 28 March 2015

This week saw a controversial Requiem Mass in Leicester, and the question
on the lips of everyone who saw it was "Not a bad service, but was he a tyrant or a devout Catholic?"
Certainly, the prevailing view among Catholics is that Vincent was a bullying
dictator, who attempted to silence all opposition and brought shame on the Catholic Church
with the wicked persecution of his enemies. But some people do hold other views.

Detested tyrant or devout Catholic? You decide.

The somewhat eccentric
Society of Vincent holds a contrary
opinion, portraying its hero as a humble and kind man, who
owned his own Bible, which he kept in pristine condition by the expedient of never reading it.
They say that Vincent was a timid person, who
wanted nothing more than to become pope, world dictator and manager
of Liverpool football club. His first step was to
fight for
a total modernization of Catholic teaching on marriage to remove its old-fashioned "Christian" emphasis
and bring it more in line with secular values.

Vincent attempts to bully a meek young journalist (unidentified).

However, the judgement of history is predominantly against Vincent.
There are claims that he launched a persecution of Catholic priests unparallelled since the era of Queen Elizabeth,
forcing the more paranoid of them to install "priests' holes" in their presbyteries. in case his henchmen
came knocking at the door. Although he was simply the ordinary of the Westminster Diocese,
and not a primate except in the zoological sense, he did not
hesitate to interfere with doings in other dioceses over which he had no formal authority.

Vincent himself liked nothing more than having his photo taken, or being interviewed on
radio and television; thus, it was all the more shocking when he attempted to imprison 500
priests in the Tower because they had written a letter to the Catholic Herald.

Richard III - humiliated after his death by Vincent.

Said Richard III, a retired king and practising Catholic: "After my death I rested peacefully in a
Catholic car-park
for 500 years, before being dug up and moved to a Protestant cathedral in Leicester.
They mocked me by giving me a funeral
according to the rites of my evil great-nephew Henry.
The Catholics, who should have known better, sent Vincent to say a Requiem Mass for me;
he didn't even realise that Masses should be in Latin, but insisted on saying it in Vernacular (a Liverpudlian dialect).
How did such an ignorant man ever become a bishop?"

"It doesn't fit too well, but your head seems to have swollen."

Sadly, Vincent's rule in Westminster was a long history of oppression.
Worried that they
were revealing too much about his activities, he denounced bloggers as "gossips", saying
that they should have no place in the Church.
He saw himself as a new St Augustine of Hippo, fighting the Donatists, when he issued
a Reflection Document for Clergy on Marriage and Family Life that brought terror into
the hearts of the faithful.
History does not (yet) record his ultimate fate: did he die in a battle with the faithful and end up
buried in a Catholic car-park? Or did he achieve his ambition of becoming Pope Francis II?

Wednesday, 25 March 2015

So 450 (saved) Catholic priests have written
a letter to the Catholic Herald, saying, in effect, that they are OK with
Christian teaching and don't want to change it.
However, there are reports that some senior churchmen
have been applying pressure against signing the letter; moreover, the
notoriously publicity-shy
Cardinal Nichols has rebuked them for communicating with the press, issuing them with
a supply of bushels, under which they are instructed to hide their lights.

A quick calculation using my fingers and toes suggests that, if invited, three bishops would definitely
have signed the letter, or at most five. The rest... oh dear.
As a now-forgotten journalist called Damian Thompson once put it, "The Magic Circle".

This is what a saved bishop looks like (Philip Egan).

It is time for a scientific analysis of our bishops, to decide whether they are saved or not. From Easter I shall keep
an informal record of mentions of bishops (or at least the ones I notice) to see whether their actions are those of
a saved or unsaved person. So Mgr Egan scored very well this week with his comments on abortion (against), same-sex
marriage (against) and family life (for). He probably gets bonus points for
upsetting
Conor Burns MP.

Of course, some bishops are hardly ever in the news. For example, we have never had occasion to mention
Bishop Drainey of Middlesbrough on this blog. Indeed, I suspect that unless you live in the Diocese of
Middlesbrough you may not have heard of him
(and possibly not even then).

Terence Drainey. Nice chasuble, but saved status unknown.

How about an unsaved bishop? Well, to take a hypothetical example, suppose that a bishop
stopped one of his deacons from writing a totally orthodox Catholic blog, and gave a
misleading account of the whole affair? Would he not be in a state of sin (and unsaved)
until he repented and that deacon's
gagging was ended? No matter how many worthy deeds he did in the mean time?

Ugh.
Let's have another saved bishop.

Another saved bishop (Mark Davies).

So how can a bishop score points? Positive things are easy, but unfortunately rather
rare: defend Catholic teaching, especially when it is attacked by MPs who really belong in
the Goon Show; ban the Tablet; refuse to allow Timothy Radcliffe or Tina Beattie to
speak on church property in your diocese; stick up for people who want traditional
forms of worship; set up a fifty-mile-radius exclusion zone in which Paul Inwood's music is banned; you know, do all the things they
taught you to do at bishop-school.

Negative things? Prevaricate about Catholic teaching; bully your clergy if they show signs of
orthodoxy; encourage the Tablet; join in dodgy
ecumenical services with Muslims and Hindus; invite dissident speakers; cosy up to ACTA...
well of course none of the bishops would ever do such a thing.

Eccles (L) watches a very senior bishop to see whether he is saved.

Naturally, other countries have unsaved bishops too. There are distressing
accounts of Bishop Bootkoski of New Jersey giving the bootkoski to Patricia Jannuzzi, a teacher in
a Catholic school who
defended traditional marriage. Well done, bishop: Cardinal Dolan, the Grandmaster of the
St Patrick's Day Gay Pride Parade, would be proud of you.

It has been announced that the sole surviving Marx Brother, Cardinal Reinhard "Rhino" Marx, long regarded as one of the funniest of
the team, is to star in a new film
A Week at the Synod.

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.

The basic plot of the film is that Rhino takes the part of Rufus T. Moneybags, the chairman of the German Bishops' Conference. He has become extremely rich as a result of a dodgy "church tax", and wishes to declare
independence from the Catholic Church, citing the precedent of the great Martin Z. Luther. This will
enable the German church to become even richer, and make up its own rules, such as rejecting
all the traddy Christian teaching about marriage and the family.

In the words of Rhino: "Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any church that will have me as a member."

Naturally, the repressive Roman Church, led by businessman Francis I. Pope, is opposed to
the Moneybags "Go it alone" policy, but
at the Synod Francis is told in no uncertain terms:
"From the moment I picked up the Catechism until I put it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."

Time for reflection: Rhino and "Harpo" Kasper, the one with nothing useful to say.

Eccles verdict: the characters played by Marx, Baldisseri and Kasper are as ludicrous as any
we have ever seen, but the plot is totally implausible. Watch out for veteran comic
Tina Beattie in the "Margaret Dumont"
role of the foolish old woman.

Sunday, 22 March 2015

We have to thank
Joseph Shaw for drawing our
attention to the heroic words of Mgr Basil "Lofty" Loftus of the Catholic Times:

Like the Gestapo in the Channel Islands during the last war who had to admit that they couldn't make everyone speak German, but forced them to drive on the right-hand side of the road, that Congregation had, regretfully, to admit that it could no longer make everyone worship in Latin, but by means of an unintelligible translation it would force them to conform to an alien culture in order to demonstrate its own superiority.

"It is I, le cleric!" Basil Loftus reveals himself to an amazed audience.

We are in the early 1960s. It is over 1500 years since the Romans left Britain, but still the
hated Catholic Church attempts to force its people to worship in Latin. Luckily, as seen
in the television series Salve, salve! there is a heroic resistance movement in which
Lofty is a key player.

Hated and feared by all is a theological consultant by the name of Josef Ratzinger of the Gestapo, whose
main aim is to suppress the use of "vernacular", a language spoken by everyone, and insist on
Tridentine rites that nobody has ever been able to understand.

The hated Herr Ratzinger of the Gestapo.

Resistance to the Nazis is centred on the Vatican II café, where Lofty the
pianist plays a selection of his favourite Catholic songs, including "It ain't necessarily so," and
"Imagine there’s no Heaven." These are later expanded into hard-hitting heretical
articles for the
Catholic Times satire page.

Vernacular is a difficult language to master, and Lofty's own preferred translation of the Mass,
which begins with "Good moaning!" is clearly defective in some respects.
Moreover, his style is based less on "Listen very carefully I shall pray this only once" than
"Don't bother listening to me now, I'll be saying the same again next week, or maybe something sillier."

Mgr Basil "Don't mention the war" Foltus.

Unfortunately, Lofty gets crazier as time goes on, and it obliges his listeners to
put cheese in their ears if they wish to maintain their sanity.
The war against the hated forces of Latin continues, and victory is by no means assured.

Are you planning a Catholic event? Are you worried that it may be too Catholic?
These days we've got to be more inclusive, and we need to include Catholics of all shades of
opinion: Protestant, atheist, Muslim, ... We don't want to give the impression that being
a Catholic is anything to do with what you believe in, as if Catholics somehow rejected liberal
secular values!
Luckily we've got just the speaker for you - Fr Timothy Radcliffe!

Consider Flame 2, then. An event for the "yoof" of today, or
middle-aged men pretending to be "yoof-ful". With
special yoof-ful guest, Cardinal "I don't think the midterm report was a mistake" Tagle, a hero of the
Extraordinary Synod, and just the cardinal to invite if you think Burke is being too, er, serious about his faith.
Radcliffe was there, too, as a man who knows how to inspire the yoof!

A yoof-ful Radcliffe.

Now pop over to Vaughan House, near Westminster Cathedral, and
listen to
Fr Timothy give
a Lenten talk on
Tolerant and Free despite being Catholic? Subtext - don't let Catholicism get in the way of
your liberalism. Are there no limits to this man's ubiquity? Incidentally, Cardinal Nichols, don't
think we didn't notice that all four speakers are male Catholic priests - no women priests, not
even a Tina Beattie. You sexist trad!

I went to Vaughan House, and all I got was this lousy mug.

The Radcliffe roadshow continues, and unless you've bought one of those tee-shirts listing all his gigs
you may not be able keep up with the man. However, the best is still to come. Over at Arundel and
Brighton they're celebrating the 50th anniversary of the diocese, as
we have mentioned before.

Many of us were hoping that Timothy Radcliffe would be the next bishop of A&B - after Cormac and Kieran he would have
kept the comedy tradition alive - but it was not to be. Mgr Richard "Tiger" Moth, Bishop of the Forces, will be the next occupant of "Conry Towers" in Pease Pottage.
That leaves a vacancy of course, and if they were to change the name to "Bishop of the Farces", then I would
be happy to write a testimonial for Radcliffe.

"Tiger" Moth prepares to land at Pease Pottage.

But we digress. One of the stars of the Arundel and Brighton mega-party is a certain Fr Radcliffe.
The best is yet to come, though, and this is a reason why you definitely mustn't miss the fun.

Help is at hand for those who've had too much Radcliffe.

As reported by Men Are Like Wine,
Paul Inwood has written a
Jubilee Mass for the
Arundel and Brighton event.
Apparently Lady Gaga was unavailable. As a Lenten penance I decided to listen to
the first few tracks. Going into the wilderness of the Inwood, that's the sort of thing I do so that
you don't have to.

Track 1: Gathering Song. What do you mean, you didn't know the Mass included a gathering song?
To be fair to Uncle Paul, it's not too bad, if you like "socially relevant" songs that only mention God as
an afterthought.
Still, the tune is a little banal, and the
use of irreverent-sounding chords sounds as if Uncle Paul wasn't paying attention in his basic harmony classes.

Track 2: Gathering Chant. Here I started biting the carpet. "Prepare the way of the Lord, Moo-oo-oo, Moo-oo-oo"???
Well, that's what it sounds like. Listen to it yourself, if
you don't believe it. These wordless noises don't really work. Same tune as in 1, with extra moo-sic.

Shouldn't that be "PARATE VIAM DOMINI MOO-OO-OO"?

Track 3: Kyrie. Not too bad, really, although it doesn't sound
spiritually nourishing, or even
particularly original. He even uses the traddy Greek words. Could we have misjudged Uncle Paul? No,
of course not.

Sunday, 15 March 2015

The future of the popular show "Pope Gear", also known as "Catholic Church", was in doubt today, after its star was involved in a "punching incident". According to reports, Jorge Bergoglio aimed a punch at an assistant producer, Dr Alberto Gasparri,
after he was rude about his mother.

A scene from "Pope Gear". Jorge test-drives yet another weird car.

This is not the first time that Jorge has been involved in controversy. Many will remember his time
in Argentina, when he managed to offend the government by attacking their same-sex marriage
bill as a "‘move’ of the father of lies who seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God."
Still, most Pope Gear fans supported him over that incident, feeling that his remarks were
theologically correct even if not politically correct.

Another stunt. A bus full of bishops races through the streets at 100 m.p.h.

However,
nearer to home, Jorge has been associated with a string of gaffes that have been less easy to defend.
His use of the term "self-absorbed, Promethean neo-Pelagians" offended many people
who did not expect to hear such language on a family show. Then again, some old ladies were
upset by his description of the European Union as
"A Europe which is now a 'grandmother', no longer fertile and vibrant."

A bad role model? Jorge has been criticised for hardly ever wearing a seatbelt.

"Here I am, a professor, and they ask me to teach flower-arranging," complains Tina.

So what of the future? Will Pope Gear continue with another presenter? The late
Raymond Burke-Star, the BBC's motoring correspondent and presenter of Tomorrow's World, has been making a comeback recently, with a highly successful UK tour. Will he take over the sedes calida?
And if he does, will Jorge start a new show, or join his predecessor in retirement?

Sunday, 8 March 2015

The true roots of Lent lie in Lancaster.
We remember the trials of
Deacon Donnelly in
the wilderness, where he was sorely tempted by a heartless bishop. Hang on, that can't
be right. Let's start again.

A new start. It is a year now since the deacon entered into a voluntary period of
prayer and reflection on my orders, and many people are wondering how long his exile
- which we described as a voluntary pause - will last.

"You will be my witnesses... unless Michael Campbell says otherwise.

My friend Eccles has kindly provided me with the "Eccles scale" by which you can judge the personality of a bishop
by the length of the sentence he imposes
on his clergy when other bishops are leaning on him to do something.

One week's pause. "A week is a long time in religion", as the saying goes - think of Holy Week. A kindly sympathetic
bishop could ask his deacon to take a week off, and then resume his defence of the faith.

Forty days and forty nights. Lent is a time for sacrifice and reflection. I myself will be visiting the
poor: some nuns have invited me round for tea and cakes, and we all know that they have a vow of poverty!
Also, they make exceedingly good cakes!
After forty days of meditation, a wise bishop would be ready to join his deacon in defending Catholic doctrine, and pfui! to the
Magic Circle.

Visiting the poor!

Three months. After silencing his deacon for three months, a bishop needs to get him blogging again,
or he (the bishop) will be regarded as a cruel taskmaster.

One year. This is getting beyond a joke. In the eyes of many the bishop is no longer a "cruel taskmaster" but
a
a "hard-hearted dictator".

Seven years. By then I will have retired to somewhere comfortable, preferably with
lots of tea and cakes. The new bishop - unless it is someone bizarre like Timothy Radcliffe - will
be only too pleased to see what Deacon Nick has to say.

Forty years. On my 112th birthday I shall make every effort to see that Deacon Donnelly's Protect the Pope
blog is up and running again. Trust me, I'm a bishop.

Cardinal Burke is in town!

It has been reported that Cardinal Burke is in the Liverpool area, and I expect that he will want to make a pilgrimage
to Lancaster, in order to visit a truly holy man (me). Ray Burke has said that priests should not sue bloggers, and I am fully in agreement with this.
In my view, they should report the bloggers to their bishops for silencing, excommunication, and possibly
chastising with a rope of knotted cords.
It is probable that Cardinal Burke will wish to discuss this with me, so I
look forward to seeing you, your Eminence. Change trains at Preston.

This sign should help you find me, Cardinal.

Some spiritual nourishment. The prophet Nathan came to King David, saying "There was a rich powerful man, who
wrote a 'Bishop's blog' with a vast readership which was sometimes almost in double figures. Then there was a poor
man who wrote a humble blog that had only a few thousand hits per day. The time came when a sacrifice was demanded,
so the rich powerful man took the poor man's blog and destroyed it."
David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, "As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this must die!"
Then Nathan said to David, "Thou art the man!"

Nathan confronts David. Makes you think,eh?

And finally.
Don't think I haven't noticed
that Deacon Donnelly has been writing
a nasty personal attack on Cardinal Kasper and Cardinal Baldisseri in the Irish paper
Catholic Voice.
That's not going to please my friend Vincent Nichols, I can tell you! The deacon attempts to
confuse the issue by using words like "paratheke" (who does he think he is, Fr John Hunwicke?) but
it's a blog in all but name.
Will nobody rid me of this turbulent deacon?

The Campbell family. Spot the bishop!

Postscript. Cardinal Burke came to tea, but he was very cross with me!

Said Seamus O'Ballyclava of the IRA, "These words of Dolan's are despicable. We are a peace-loving organization
that shoots people rather than decapitating them. What's more, all we want is a united Socialist Ireland, and
we are not in the least interested in Catholicism."

Said Jihad Jimmy of ISIS,
"These words of Dolan's are despicable. We are a religious army, similar to your own Salvation Army.
We're not very good at shooting, so we
throw people
off the top of high buildings and remove their surplus heads. What's more, we are deeply religious Allah-fearing people,
and we throw our shoes at Cardinal Dolan."

"Here comes Dolan!" Three Irishmen adopt Islamic customs.

Both: WE HATE DOLAN.

Said Seamus, "You know, Jimmy. This could be the start of a beautiful
friendship between us. I think we could learn a lot from
you. Tell us more about decapitation."

Said Jimmy, "Brother Seamus, you may be an infidel, but you're our sort of infidel! How can we get away with murder
by becoming involved in
a 'peace process'?"

Sunday, 1 March 2015

In the UK, we have traditionally taken a dim view of murder. Of course, the law has always recognised
exceptions: when the killer's life is in danger, or someone else's, then killing may be allowed (the self-defence plea).
Moreover, murder on health grounds - assisted suicide - is not usually prosecuted as it would not be
"in the public interest". You're not interested in the fact that old Mrs Goggins was bumped off, are you? Well,
you've no right to be.

"I don't need any assistance, thank you very much."

Still, things have drifted slightly since the 1960s, and it became necessary to clarify whether one was allowed to
bump someone off on the basis of their gender (sex). Having Auntie Moly around the house
all day long drinking gin is such a nuisance, and I would have preferred an uncle, with whom I
would have had more in common. He would probably have helped with the garden too.
Auntie Moly's presence is damaging my health, indeed you might
exaggerate 100 times and say that my life is in danger. So I can
murder her, right?

WRONG. The law forbids this. Or does it?

"Legislation isn't needed," says Yvette Cooper.

Yvette Cooper ("the only woman with Balls" as a rude joke has it) thinks that legislation to
clarify this matter would be a bad idea.
As explained by Tim Stanley, the arguments against making
sex-selective murder illegal are:

0. It's already illegal, but we mustn't say so, as that will stop
people from doing it.
1. Using the word "murder" isn't in the spirit of anti-murder
legislation.
2. There are faults specific to each sex, e.g. men are lazy and women
are garrulous (or vice-versa) and so, er, this is a bad idea.
3. Stopping murders may cause people to murder, in frustration at not
being allowed to murder.
4. It stigmatises the "murdering community".

Jack the Ripper. Chose his victims by gender, but don't stigmatise him!

So, no change there, then. Murder remains mostly illegal, even though everyone's doing it. Murder
on the basis of the victim's sex is also illegal, but we mustn't say so. And in fact, the law
will probably turn a blind eye if you try it. British justice - the finest in the world!

After the startling revelation that Jihadi John's real name is Mohammed Emwazi - and not George Galloway after all - we must
each ask ourselves "COULD THIS HAPPEN TO ME"?

Little Mo. Bad breath, not potty-trained until he was 15, ugly, but otherwise normal.

Little Mo was, by all accounts, a saintly boy who hardly ever pulled the wings off butterflies or
stuck pins in frogs. However, all the other kids mocked him, and so it was natural for
him to grow up to be a serial killer and sadist.
Still, some say that his personality changed when he ran into a goal post - a clear sign that football can be
a radicalising influence.

We have this tribute to Little Mo on the authority of CAGE, one of the few
apologists for terrorists to have charitable status.
As Lord Carlile so profoundly puts it, CAGE needs to make clear they reject murder.
Apparently, this is something the Charity Commission insists on (except, arguably, in the case
of the BPAS). Even the National Trust has
decommissioned all its weapons of mass destruction.

CAGE fighting is not as glamorous as you might think.

So if CAGE could give us 4 minutes and 33 seconds
of silence, it would be much appreciated. Permanent silence would be even better.

Now, are YOU being radicalised? Did your mother tell you to tidy your bedroom when you were
a child? Did the girl/boy/camel you invited out to the pictures tell you that you were a boring
toad smelling of urine? Did the bus-driver refuse to stop when he saw you? Did it rain yesterday?
Do you think that Britain's foreign policy is a disaster (actually, this is a perfectly normal point of view)?

The Satanic State's Jihad Johnnie models a burka (don't ask why).

These are all danger signs.
Are you thinking of changing your name to
Crusading Chris, Fighting Freda, Warring Wally, or Holy Smoke Moly?
(Of course you won't use the name Mohammed, as nobody will take you seriously.)
Have you been
looking up Ryanair flights to the Levant (nearest airport Beirut, then hitch a lift)?

Of course, this post is mainly addressed to our younger readers, especially the
more stupid of them, but the "call" can come at any age. Even 80-year-old ladies
have a role to play in the Satanic State, if they are vicious and sadistic enough.
After all, murdering hostages doesn't require much skill or strength.

Now, if you feel you are being radicalised (what we used to call "p*ssed off with life"),
we urge you to take it
gently. Start by campaigning for a party that wants to turn Britain upside-down,
such as the Greens, or Respect, or the Monster Raving Loonies.
If this
doesn't satisfy your radical ambitions, you could try studying the works of
great thinkers such as Russell Brand, or
Giles Fraser. Nothing too aggressive. Got that? Great.

We have been retained by God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit (hereinafter referred to as the
Trinity) in relation to various of your public pronouncements that have been judged to be false, defamatory, or both.

This is a preliminary notice, and our clients reserve the right to
require your soul of you and
send you to the Lake of Fire, without the necessity of any further warning.

These are some of your public statements to which we take exception:

Defamatory.

In particular, you did insult the Mother of Christ by describing the Holy Family of Nazareth as
"irregular". Apart from charges of blasphemy, with which our clients will proceed when you reach the Day of Judgement,
we should point out that you are bringing God the Son's Church into disrepute by
trivialising the principle of Verbum Caro Factum Est, and
you are undermining our clients' teaching on marriage as an indissoluble bond made between a man and
a woman.

Disgraceful.

Furthermore, you did label Cardinal Burke and his associates, by implication, as "dissenters", for
upholding Christian teaching. This again may be regarded as a direct attack on our clients in Heaven, who
have incurred serious damage to their reputation
and the probable loss of many souls
as a result of your careless words.

Moreover, you did threaten a harmless blogger, Vox Cantoris, with legal action
after he made critical comments about your activities. This also undermines the
ChristianTM principles in which our clients have an interest.
We are prepared to argue in court that the legal maxim of Loftus Hereticus Toleratus - whereby a well-known comedian
can persuade some people to take him seriously no matter what he says - does not apply in your case.

Our clients are waiting to hear from you.

Your offences are all the more culpable, as you appear to be in a position of power and influence in the
Vatican, and thus your words may be construed as carrying some sort of official endorsement from
our clients.
This you have never obtained, and although you have on several occasions
attempted to address our clients
by means of prayers, you have taken no notice of their response.

In short, our clients demand that you put a sock in it, Rosica.

Yours truly,
Nina Tort.

BREAKING NEWS. The Trinity's solicitors are also writing to Cardinal Baldisseri, concerning
the
theft of copies of a book authored by five senior cardinals, which was
sent to all participants at last year's Extraordinary
Synod on the Family. The book, "The New Testament", by Cardinals Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul (with
additional material by some trusted colleagues), was a complete answer to the fantasies
of Cardinal Kasper. It is suspected that Cardinal Baldisseri wished to hide this book from synod participants,
many of whom would not have read it.

List of awards this blog has won

Best blog by an idiotBest blog by someone who is truly savedBlog most read by saved peopleCruellest blog attacking saintly pious peopleMost spiritual blog by a sockpuppetKieran Conry prize for virtue, modesty and humilityPottymouth Times award for the nastiest blog everStupidest pictures ever seen on a blogLeast read blog of 2015 (2nd prize to Bruvver Bosco)Tina Beattie medal for promoting orthodoxy"Utter filth" (Sheds and Shedmen, Croydon)

Bishop of Lancaster's cup for well-placed ad hominem attacks

Eccles has been named as one of the 100 most influential saved people in Notting Hell, by the prestigious Calumny Chapel Parish Newsletter.